Performance Evaluation of Sequential Decoding System for UDP-Based Systems for Wireless Multimedia Networks

Sequential decoders are convolutional channel decoders that are characterized by having variable decoding complexity in changing channel conditions. They are widely used in wireless packet-switching networks and mobile communications. The major difference of multimedia networks from traditional networks is the deadline to display or (play) the arriving packets. Especially, this is more obvious in realtime video streaming applications. Real-time video streaming applications prefer User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for video packet transfers. The operation of sequential decoding in this paper is applied on wireless multimedia networks. Buffers are usually required by the sequential decoder to store packets if there is an empty space. Geometric/Pareto/1/N queue model is used to describe the behavior of the sequential decoders with finite buffers. In this paper, we present an analytical study on the finite buffer behaviors of the sequential decoding system and provide closed form expression for the blocking probability due to limited buffer capacity, system throughput, and average buffer occupancy. We present also a simulation study to show the average buffer occupancy. KEYWORDS—Sequential decoder, average buffer occupancy, queuing analysis, blocking probability, system throughput.